I keep a running list: things I wish I could take pictures of but can't. Things like reflections sans cameras, the reflection of my eyes in the interior of my own sunglasses, and the flat grainy mosaic of color seen when truly unfocused. But perhaps most often desired; the ribbon flicker of dying fluorescents. And as I've said and say, I have a relationship to fluorescent lighting, always have.

It dawned on me the other day, I can't take one picture; but I can take many. Each animated GIF below is composed of 24 frames, three frames per second. Turns out, the rate at which the images flicker is dependent on the computer/browser combo you are running, but is significantly slower than is perceptible to the eye in all cases. I'm working on something faster.

After a long hiatus from my Site Meter in search of nobility, I'm returning from lean months with only a faint sense of the hundred-some that arrive here each day. Over the Fourth, sifting through search terms, I learned there's a new treehouse in Bushwick.

Art/Research Project Working Group We'd like to invite all systems-minded, analytically-inclined and statistics-obsessed readers who are fascinated by humans and the human experience to a meeting on Tuesday, June 13th. We're organizing a night of participatory processing, data-collection, aggregation and interpretation to take place in August at The Treehouse in Bushwick, and we're putting together a working group to help us. If you believe in paying attention, to people and patterns, and if you know that it's easier to pay attention when you break a problem into parts, we want to talk to you. The working group will meet periodically in June and July (scheduling is flexible) to design surveys, discuss methodologies and make projections. On the night of the project's launch, as it tests the hypotheses of the previous months, the group will act as a sort of collective self-reflection engine for the subjects/attendees. Interested? Send us an email and tell us why. Include a brief paragraph about your background and interest in this project – you don’t need to be a professional researcher, but we are looking for people with serious intent and relevant skills. Compensation: unpaid

Thursday morning Heather passed this tag on Halsey and debated picking it up for me. She didn't, sensing I'd have little interest having not found it myself. I'd passed by the same spot an hour earlier, and it had not been there.

Friday morning, running late to a department breakfast I saw and plucked it up mid-stride, unaware that she had a prior relationship to the object. It had been exactly 24 hours since she walked on.

Would it have remained untouched for a day, had she not shown interest? Would it have caught my eye and attention, had it not hers?

The Cave has a vestigial door, locked on our side, drywalled over on the other. The drywalled side sits behind a hallway door often flung. So, hard as our super tries--with mesh and infinite spackle--he'll never seal a wall that wants to breathe.

As those close know (because I talk Mac shit more than I should), I am now in possession of a MacBook Pro. So far it's performed admirably, with none of the whine and few of the heat issues I was expecting. My boss ordered one the week they came out, and has been bemoaning that choice, often, ever since--I'm hoping to fair better.

Maybe it's because I'm migrating from a reasonably recent PowerBook, but I've found the new machine to be a little anticlimactic. Just not many of the new-toy-jitters the arrival of a device like this warrants, ya know.

Sure, it's faster. It's thinner--a hair lighter. WiFi works. It has a nicer screen. But when your wife asks what makes it so cool (what makes it better than her G4), and you can't answer without citing specs or standards, you start to feel a little less than satisfied.

Apple knew this, so they threw in two things. Front Row and Photo Booth--both, just sure to wow the family--both, easily (visually) understood reasons for an upgrade, right? And so it went. Since January, people have been escorting these perfect slabs of aluminum home, opening them tenderly, and then...

Showing their children and pals how to take distorted and/or grossly filtered pictures of themselves--dozens in a row--for hours. I've done it, I was showing her Photo Booth within seconds of running out of other reasons I was so psyched. And like everyone it seems (Flickr's awash in these grainy video stills), she loved it. Humans simply love pictures of themselves, and Photo Booth makes it so easy to indulge.

So while I was drinking an after-work beer and watching Heather make faces into a $2000 funhouse mirror, an idea came to me.

Goatse Booth

In a similar session of laptop-enabled quality time a couple months ago, I showed her what Goatse is. I have no idea how it came up--probably in the same sentence as The Dancing Baby. But she didn't know what I was talking about, so I was obligated to explain.

Of course, I just pulled up the image (couldn't blow the punch line). She reacted as all do, horror followed immediately by some slack-jawed questions. How is this man doing this to himself?! And why the FUCK are you showing this to me?!

Laughing, I told her it's an old internet meme that's become part of nerd folklore--people just know about it, like they do 1337. Interested in such things (I'm lucky), she dismissed my explanation as simplistic and immediately Wikipedia'd it.

First Goatse, a group pool dedicated solely to pictures of people taken as they first witness the glory of Goatse. Pictures capturing their perplexed repulsion. Pictures capturing this perverse internet initiation ceremony (a practice possibly credited to Laszlo Toth).

Now, what happens when you combine a generation of people who think this is a funny thing to do to people, thriving photo-sharing communities with open APIs, and your own personal photo booth? My second proposed application: Goatse Booth, a modification to Apple's Photo Booth. I say proposed, as we all know I'm no dev. But that didn't stop me before--so if you're hot in Xcode and looking to give the internet a gift, take it from here.

At first glance the app would look no different than Photo Booth; only the window title and menu bar would be altered. An unsuspecting user might wonder why all the images in the drawer share the same expression, but by the time they've had that thought, they'll be looking at this.

A moment prior to the close of the shutter, Goatse Booth will display hello.jpg (in place of the full-screen flash). Then it'll give the viewer a moment to react before snapping a pic of their reaction (if activated in the preferences, a second image can be taken that captures their face as it transforms to express befuddled curiosity).

Upon completion of the review process, Goatse Booth will pop-up a Send to Flickr dialog (this can be disabled in the prefs). By default, it will want to send the image to both firstgoatse and goatsebooth.

So, what's wrong with Photo Booth? It doesn't have a native ability to upload images to common image-centric websites, nor a plug-in architecture to allow this (speaking of plug-in architectures, why can't I make my own Photo Booth effects in Quartz Composer?). It doesn't have a way to disable the full-screen flash (wtf?). AND it doesn't abuse it's user with cult images of anal acrobatics.

If only the horror went the way of the bits being uploaded...The violence, however, gets deposited into our own Black Boxes. No hope of release, no hope of catharsis. The visual equivalents of Inez and Estelle--hell is other images. (http://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/hell/sart.html)

Just before running out of the house, I polished off a few remaining newsfeeds. The last was The Known Universe, of which I am a regular. I pulled on my iPod and as I walked Halsey, made a concerted effort to divine the energy I haven't found lately.